


Milky White Eyes

by PluieTheWolf



Category: Twin Peaks
Genre: Canonical Character Death, Crack Crossover, Crossover, Fire, Gen, Implied/Referenced Character Death
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2020-01-04
Updated: 2020-01-04
Packaged: 2021-02-27 07:28:31
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,487
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/22113376
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/PluieTheWolf/pseuds/PluieTheWolf
Summary: He arrived one day, without warning.But it felt like he had always been here.
Comments: 2
Kudos: 3





	Milky White Eyes

He always wore sunglasses. She didn’t think it was that odd. After all, she wore always wore glasses, and no one seemed to question that.

He had walked into the library one day and asked for books about knitting.

In a small town like Twin Peaks you notice when there is someone new. Word gets around. But the strange thing with him was, it didn’t. You would just see him one day, wondering down the street, and you would be sure that you’d seen him before. No one could quite say when he’d arrived.

And so when she handed over an old Columbia-Minerva binder, she did not wonder at the stranger’s sudden appearance.

But she did wonder.

\--

She climbed the overgrown slope – stepping carefully through the brush – and breathed a lungful of the clean air, pine fresh. 

She felt right, among these trees. She thought, sometimes, if it weren’t for Sam, and the library, and the Sierra Club, she would just keep walking and get lost. Again.

As it was she went there with Sam and she went there alone. With the group as well, but as much as she loved them, loved that they loved what she loved with all their hearts, she still didn’t feel that she fit. The concept was perfect for her, but maybe not the people. She had tried to lead a tour once.

So, there alone again, she glanced up to see an owl’s nest and down again to see him. Sitting, there, on a chopped off trunk, and she couldn’t tell what he was looking at, those dark glasses glinting light.

\--

He came to return the book and seemed even more at home than he had before. Almost standing out in his fitting in. A swagger. The binder laid on the counter at perfect right angles to its edges.

“A mighty fine book you got there, darlin’. If ya don’t mind me sayin’”

“Are you a knitter yourself?” 

She shocked herself by replying.

“No ma’am, but ya might say I… appreciate the concept.”

“I feel it too. It reminds me of the simple mysteries. They are complex, the forces that knit us together, yet we follow them every day as if by a pattern, each step too much a habit to realise we do not understand the workings by which we live.”

“Well, my. I can’t say I coulda said it better myself.”

\--

She saw him again. In the library, mostly, but also in the street, one time in the diner with Sam.

She did not see him in the woods again, but she sometimes thought she might have, if she had set out a couple of minutes earlier.

Sometimes they did not speak and sometimes they did. Either way it felt like they had, perhaps not an understanding, no, in fact the opposite of that. It felt that they are both suspended in the same heavy liquid of mystery.

They both spoke in words which did not fit easily into the ears of most. They might not have understood what the other said, but their lack of understanding did not bristle either one, as it might other people. And sometimes their words seemed like they may almost make contact, meet in the middle, the universes that each held brushing somewhere at their edges.

\--

She shelved books, replacing those from the trolley to their rightful spots, and several stacks away she heard him read aloud. A great deal of it was numbers, some single words and phrases, often repeated.

She had helped him find the book, a book on farming, not a manual, really, or a memoir, or a history. An almanac she supposed. Soil conditions and rainfall and crop yields. A litany.

A litany that grew louder through closeness. Till it was just a couple of steps away loud. And then it was her turning to face him loud.

And the litany now seemed interspersed with more of what she had come to expect from him. But somehow more, more woven into a poetry where each single word struggled to hold onto some meaning, let alone whole sentences at a time.

As he talked she stared into his glasses. They were almost nose to nose now, still and staring. In the dark black she could see herself reflected, the white globe of her face, doubled where his eyes would be.

She could not hear more than a rhythm of his words. All her focus was on that darkened plastic, willing her sight to peak through its surface for a moment.

\--

\--

\--

He was invited to the wedding, somewhere along the way, but she never thought he would come.

He didn’t.

She felt all day like the calm in the centre of a storm. 

\--

The phone was already ringing when they entered the room. There was never a question of not answering it. There might be the desire, but the desire to not pick up the phone is not how these stories go.

\--

Sam took the car to the blaze. She stood by their gate, not looking at the road he had left by.

Looking instead at the trees.

Her dress may have been flimsy, the most impractical she had ever worn, but she has never worn shoes that are not sturdy. 

She crossed the road and waded into the beginning of the brush.

She was not sure whether she was untethered, finally giving in to her yearning to be lost again, or whether her mooring had shifted, for the course she took was straight as a line, through rough terrain and over tree trunk.

She thought to herself in this time she is walking Sam may have finished, the fire could be out, he could return home to an empty house, a gate hanging open, or even to some other her, some her that did not leave. And in this time they would kiss and cook breakfast and change the gate and raise children and walk again in these woods and lay down one final time in the mulch.

As she approached the weight of the crackling sound shifted from the brittle leaves beneath her feet to something far ahead of her. Then something less far.

The heat came next, before the light.

She walked on straight.

\--

The figure at the centre of the blaze seemed at first like a trick, like the leaping gaps between the flames lying to her. She knew it was not Sam – he was no phantom, no illusion, but solid at a tree, circles of life’s passing years locked tight within him, but the edges of his bark dry and loose in places, like any being that has weathered the elements. Perhaps a little too like kindling. 

No, she did not need the hair or the swagger or the glasses to tell it was him. No one else could look so at home in a place it was impossible they could be.

In fact even from that angle she could tell he wasn’t wearing the glasses at all.

It became more and more clear as he turned towards her.

When the place the sunglasses would have been became level with her eyes she couldn’t help but blink, against the smoke, against the tears, against the impossibility of what she was seeing.

She had seen strangeness in her time. She may not have remembered, she could not describe, but she knew it has given her an air, a sense of moving through the world in a way that nothing could touch her, could shock her.

But she was shaking.

She wanted to reach up to her eyes, not to cover them, but to check they were still there perhaps, or to dispute what she saw in front of her.

For there, the twin globes in his face were not pupil or iris or white. No, there was too much white but it was not smooth and glistening, it was soft and uneven and fiberous.

Balls of cotton, flames rising from them as if they burnt, but never blackening, never curling, never shrinking down.

She stared into the impossible eyes till she could not see them anymore. The burning white filled her vision, or the black smoke, or her eyes closed against it or her own focus failing, her body falling to the forest floor.

\--

When she awoke the fire was gone and so was he. 

And she knew that Sam was gone too.

Her tree was gone but so many remained around her, though their edges were charred by the flames.

\--

Just as when he first came it seemed that most people did not notice the exact moment of it happening, or the direction he took.

But he was gone.

Joe had left town.

And Margaret remained.

\--

_If it hadn't been for Cotton-Eye Joe  
I'd been married long time ago  
Where did you come from?  
Where did you go?  
Where did you come from, Cotton-Eye Joe?_

**Author's Note:**

> This utterly ridiculous thing was inspired by (and the summary is a quote from) the Great Work of Art 'Milky White Eyes' by Nat Norland - https://soundcloud.com/nat-norland/milky-white-eyes.


End file.
